Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Worst Non-Fiction Books of the Century

The Fifty WORST Books of the Century

The Worst of the Worst

1. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
So amusing did the natives find the white woman's prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales-and she believed them! Mead misled a generation into believing that the fantasies of sexual progressives were an historical reality on an island far, far away.

3. Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of Science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is gathered on the sexual responses of children as young as five. A pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is "statistically" normal.

4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Dumbed-down Heidegger and a seeming praise of kinkiness became the Bible of the sixties and early postmodernism.

5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)
Dewey convinced a generation of intellectuals that education isn't about anything; it's just a method, a process for producing democrats and scientists who would lead us into a future that "works." Democracy and Science (both pure means) were thereby transformed into the moral ends of our century, and America's well-meaning but corrupting educationist establishment was born.

The Rest of the Worst

Theodor W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
Don't want to be bothered to engage the arguments of your conservative political opponents? Just demonstrate "scientifically" that all their political beliefs are the result of a psychological disorder.

Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1935)
Beard reduces support for the U.S. Constitution to a conspiracy among the Founding Fathers to protect their economic interests. Forrest McDonald's We The People provides the corrective.

Martin Bernal, Black Athena (1987)
All of Western philosophical and scientific thought was stolen from Africa and a conspiracy ensued to conceal the theft for more than three millennia. Provocative, but where's the evidence?

Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm (1979)
Chomsky's anti-anti-communism was so intense that he was driven to deny the genocide perpetrated by Cambodian communists-stipulating of course that even if the charges against the Khmer Rouge were true, massacres were at least understandable, perhaps even justified.

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (1968)
A rapist and murderer whose denunciation of The Man brought him the admiration of guilt-stricken white liberals.

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)
What this scientist proclaimed as an inevitable "fact"— that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s—turned out entirely "evitable."

Harvey Cox, The Secular City (1965)
Celebrated the liberation that accompanied modern urban life at the precise moment when such liberation came to mean the freedom to be mugged, raped, and murdered. Argued that "death of god" theology was the inevitable and permanent future for modern man just before the contemporary boom in "spirituality."

Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1919)
A pernicious book that celebrates the growth of the welfare state and champions the unlikely prospect of "achieving Jeffersonian ends through Hamiltonian means."

Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1936)
Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask—and rightly so. The first influential book to take a wholly clinical view of human sexuality divorced from values, morals, and emotions.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)
Made Americans dissatisfied with the ineradicable fact of poverty. Led to foolish public policies that produced the hell that was the 1960s.

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966-69)
Writing glib, cliché-ridden verbiage about the virtues of irreligion, Gay matches the sophistry of the dimmest lumières.

Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (1976)
The self-absorbed, unrepentant, and generously fabricated memoir of an American Stalinist.

Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (1988)
Hiss draws attention to his essential mediocrity in this sad tale of a life led largely to conceal a lie, a lie in which thousands felt compelled to participate.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
Huxley paved the way to the ruin of countless lives by writing up his experience with mescaline as a sort of primordial homecoming and lending his all-too considerable prestige to the claimed benefits of hallucinogenic drugs.

Philip Johnson & Henry Russell Hitchcock, The International Style (1966)
Build ugly buildings, wear funny glasses, make lots of money, and justify it all by writing a book.

John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956)
Should have been called, Profiles in Ghost-Writing.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
This book did for Big Government what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did for the tse-tse fly.

Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Leary always said it was a mistake to take things too seriously. This book proves he was right at least once in his life.

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968)
Fact or fiction? Not even Mailer knew for sure.

Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (1993)
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me." Not according to Catharine MacKinnon. This book provides the foundation for some of the most ridiculous developments in recent American law.

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
Bored with the real Gospels and real Christianity, professors of religion were thrilled to find out how important—not to mention feminist and pre-Socratic—these fragments were.

Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (1907)
This favorite of East Coast busybodies gave crucial middlebrow intellectual support to the proposition of an income tax. Called for a general willingness among Americans "to bestow without conditions and to be taxed for public and far-reaching ends." Thanks a lot, Simon Patten.

The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times, Based on Investigative Reporting by Neil Sheehan (1971)
Publicizing the blunderings of "the Best and the Brightest" did nothing but undermine the new President’s—Nixon’s—statesmanl ike efforts to salvage the mess in Vietnam bequeathed to him by JFK and LBJ.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (1950)
Popper "shows" that he is smarter and more open-minded than Plato or Hegel. That kind of thinking is one of the main obstacles to open-mindedness in our time.

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)
"[The Church] should therefore strengthen the existing communistic institutions and aid the evolution of society from the present temporary stage of individualism to a higher form of communism." Eek!

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
The hollow soul of liberalism elaborated with a technical apparatus that would have made a medieval Schoolman blush.

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)
--and after that, Reed went home and the Bolsheviks struck the set.

Charles Reich, The Greening of America (1970)
Out of blue jeans, marijuana, free love, and the monumental egoism of a generation that refused to grow up, a Yale Law School professor concocted an adolescent fantasy: Consciousness III. Groovy, man.

Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1942)
The notion that sitting in one of Reich’s orgone boxes would lead both to a happy individual and to a healthy and free society was only one indication of Reich’s absurdity. If only the real thing had worked as well as Woody Allen’s orgasmatron.

Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961)
Rogers disconnected human feelings from nature, disconnected the human and the spiritual from both real religion and the rigor of science, and ruined countless Roman Catholic religious orders in the process. Made B.F. Skinner look good.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
The best, and therefore worst, exposition of American philosophical pragmatism. Had devastating effects on the study not only of philosophy but also of literature.

Jerry Rubin, Do It! (1970)
The Bible of the lazy and the crazy.

Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not A Christian (1936)
Known to be harmful to your spiritual health.

Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)
This founder of Planned Parenthood published Adolph Hitler’s eugenics guru in her magazine in the early 1930s. That Women and the New Race sprang from Sanger is no surprise.

Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (1982)
Amidst much amateur philosophical rumination, Schell proposed a syllogism: Nuclear war necessarily means the extinction of the human race. No human value (such as political liberty) can justify such an act. Therefore, unilateral disarmament is morally mandatory. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan’s vigorous confrontation with the Soviets ended the Cold War and saved us from the fear of Armageddon.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945)
Whig History sees past ages striving bravely to become...us. In Schlesinger’s Boddhisatva history, every age has a liberal Enlightened One who comes to battle the conservatives.

B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
Swallowing whole the superstitions of modern scientism, this psychologist was convinced that the human psyche was nothing but a superstition.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)
Don’t think. Just feel.

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1964)
The book that ruined social history. In over 800 pages, Thompson recasts the story of English working folk into a simplistic Marxist romance. This would become the cookie cutter for a generation’s worth of bland dissertations and predictable monographs.

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952)
Believing in modern meaninglessness more than in "the God of theism," this theologian preached Courage (self-assertion "in spite of") rather than Faith. But would the Romans have even bothered to throw him to the lions?

H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (1928)
Wells emerges as the comically earnest would-be John the Baptist for a new religion of temporal salvation to be ushered in by a vanguard embracing "the supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation of a world directorate." Oh, my.

Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913)
According to H.L. Mencken, a book for "the tender-minded in general." He staggered to behold "the whole Wilsonian buncombe...its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence on greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descents into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Malcolm X (with the assistance of Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
"By any means necessary"? No, violence was not, and is not, the answer.

3. Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of Science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is gathered on the sexual responses of children as young as five. A pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is "statistically" normal.

I've only read
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
How exciting can economics be anyway? I mean no car chases or drug ods - what exactly were these birds expecting to name it one of the worst ?

Okay, I was dissapointed to see any philosophy books (Rawls, Dewey) on this list because I don't think that philosophy books are ever bad on their own...you have to evaluate the whole system...but I can't BELIEVE they included Rorty's Mirror of Nature of here (and bashed pragmatism along with it).

Rorty is the most innovative American thinker this century in my opinion and while his ideas take some serious diegestion his book at least provides a novel way to look at the world (truth is a construct, certainty is only a word, etc...).

P.S. - I personally hate Rorty but I so appreciate his thought. Thanks for posting the list so I can see just how backwards "Intercollegiates" can be!

I'd never encountered Intercollegiate Studies Institute before, and browsing through this list, and the attached commentary from the unnamed compiler who I bestowed a name of convienience in my mind while I read of "Sparky", because of his/her snarky wit, I thought the list, as well as the comments said so much more about our helpmate compiler than it did about the list in general.

Searching out Intercollegiate Studies Institute made the list immediately make more sense to me (personally).

"There was broad agreement about a majority of titles, but ther were also fierce disagreements. Several titles appeared on both "Best" and "Worst" lists. We have tried to be faithful to the contributions of our consultants, but the responsibility of final composition of the list lay with the editors of the IR." (Intercollegiate Review)

Too quick to leap to conclusions, I was surprised that the article spoke as openly as it did about the "fierce disagreements", after my admittedly quick pass through the parent sites portals. Even though I haven't read, let alone studied the bulk of the books on the list, I'd wondered when reading the worst what their criteria was, as even if you disagree with the topic matter or conclusions, it seemed (to me) that there was some worthy writing being thrown out with the trash. The article explains their thinking on the matter.

Malcolm X (with the assistance of Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) made it onto both "Best" and "Worst" lists, the bottom entry on both lists, and the only book I noticed that received that backhanded honor.

This was practically the Woman's Bible when I was a young housewife in the late '70's. It was considered required reading for the mother-to-be, and the reason my son was born by the Leboyer birthing method, a childbirth technique wherein the infant is delivered into a tank of warm water to relieve the anxiety of the birth process. Oh those crazy hippie days! Seriously, this book was groundbreaking in that it contained good information on hush-hush subjects like abortion, orgasms and alternative lifestyles (read lesbianism). It opened my eyes and was very empowering. I can't imagine this being on a "worst book list".

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s national program is designed “to educate for liberty.”

ISI was founded in 1953 to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political, and spiritual values that sustain a free and virtuous society.

Thats a little bit of this mysterious groups mission statement. Evidently some kind of conservative think tank/ institution? Their 50 best books are rather unconventional, not real lovers of fiction apparently...